How Effectively did Parliamentary Candidates Use Social Media During the 2015 UK General Election Campaign

Abstract

Many academics and political commentators have speculated that the rise of the internet, and in particular social media, could transform political communications. In the run up to the 2015 UK general election we saw an emphasis on the potential impact of social media campaigning, with many headlines suggesting that this could be the first social media election. The purpose of this paper is to determine how effectively parliamentary candidates used social media during the 2015 UK general election campaign period, by creating a typology of the ways in which candidates behaved on social media. The primary research conducted, which included analysis of the Twitter and Facebook posts (n = 616) made by a sample of candidates (n = 10), focused on 4 main post functions: broadcasting, posters/infographics, organising, and interacting. The results show that overall UK politicians mainly used social media as a unidirectional method of communication, as opposed to interacting. However, this research also found key differences between Twitter and Facebook, the former used much more interactively.